Yeah. Comes with the being magical and superpowered. More durable, too, but don't count on it too much, I can still die. Most of us die in the first year.

I am absolutely expecting you to die, don't worry.

Cool, cool. I did tell you I'd try my very best not to, like, six hours ago, though, so I'm gonna go ahead and try not to make it easy for anyone.

Sure.

She sits down with her back to a tree. Also to him. She's just about out of emotional processing power, and this tree doesn't seem super qualified to protect her from situations that are going to require more of it, but it's about the only other thing she has right now. She makes sure her waterfalls are up.

She thinks she might miss Alex more than she has ever missed anyone in her entire life right now. She also misses Azalea. She cuts herself off there, because she can't actually afford to have more of a breakdown about, like, the mailman or someone. But she thinks about Alex - thinks about how he'd tell her that this was utter and complete bullshit, and he's sorry she has to deal with it and he's sorry he can't protect her from it, and she's handling it - passably, at least, probably. Or if he wouldn't tell her this stuff, then he would probably still be pretty supportive of her thinking he would, for the sake of clinging to the pieces of her fraying sanity, because she's had a really really really terrible night, and everyone she knows is sort of effectively dead right now, except that they're worse than dead, because she's probably going to end up altering the timeline enough that a bunch of them won't be able to come into existence, which means they're not in heaven and that if she doesn't reverse this whole thing then she can't ever see them again, not ever.

She wipes her tears away with the back of her hand. She bites her hand, not because this seems super likely to help, but because her brain produces the thought that she should try this. It does help, a little bit. Makes her hand hurt more and her heart hurt a little bit less. She doesn't bite hard enough to break the skin, though, so it can only help a little bit. After that she prays, asking for strength and guidance and wisdom. She tries to scoop all of the awful out of herself and offer it up to God, because at least He's probably big enough to handle it.

Can you stand watch for like eight hours? And wake me up if you decide to stop doing that before I wake up?

Do I fuck around that much even in the future when I like you?

No.

I don't want to make assumptions.

Get some sleep. I can look after you until you die and kill attacking demons, it's not that big of a deal.

OK. Thank you.

- uh, you don't have to make me a bow when you're done with that one, but I'll be more useful if you do. Just. In the interest of sharing information.

I don't actually know how to make one with a draw weight humans can handle.

I'm a lot stronger than I look. You might wanna scale it down a little, since I'm shorter than you, but I'm not actually weaker.

Okay.

OK. Thanks.

And she lies down in the grass and makes a pillow out of one arm and tries very hard to get some rest. 

No one comes by in the next nine hours or so. At some point the sun comes up.

He has two bows with no string, which he'll have to kill an animal for, and some spears to make that go faster. He's singing to himself and sharpening his knife.

Eventually Karen wakes up and stares off into space for a bit, remembering where she is and marshaling her emotional resources until she can engage with any aspect of her current situation at all.

OK. I think I should obtain a newspaper somehow, assuming you have not been paying super close attention to the passage of the Gregorian calendar; I wanna know what year it is. I think I should figure out how to make money, since I am not actually confident that I can survive out in the middle of nowhere forever. I guess as a subset of that I might have to figure out what I can do in this time period as a - maybe I can pass for male in this time period without getting in trouble, I don't know. No idea what East Asians are and are not allowed to do, other than that nobody seemed to be objecting to my existence. I think I should - start brainstorming anything in the direction of going home, assuming there even exists a home to go back to now. Should simultaneously work on figuring out why we were dragged here. I will at some point need to eat something.

I can catch us something to eat. Surviving away from society's not that hard, really, and if we steer clear of humans it won't matter what they'd let you do. I guess it might make it harder to identify how you were dragged here.

Yeah, if nothing else I'm gonna need to tap into the network of people who know about mystical stuff, I'm not gonna get anywhere on that front on my own. Plus - I mean if I am stuck here, then I figure I have some kind of duty to protect people from whatever nasty stuff is hiding in London, and the nasties that go around causing problems mostly go where the people are.

I can't live in that city. 

...yeah.

We should have a meeting place or something, so I can find you again when I've figured some stuff out. I - may or may not be able to find a random bunch of trees again. Leaning towards not. But I guess as long as I'm within forty miles or so I can get you over osanwë, maybe that's enough?

I dunno what a mile is but if you're in the city I won't be able to hear you from here.

...you think? OK, well - maybe if you were closer to a road or something. I could probably follow a road.

Why don't you at least wait until you've recovered to go back into the city. Or, if you want to help people, some of them live in little villages that aren't anywhere near as bad as the cities.

Honestly I mostly really want to know what year it is. I can't make good predictions about what anything is gonna be like until I have things narrowed down to less than two entire centuries.

- I guess there's always the 'risk looking like a crazy person' option where you find some people and go up and ask them, though.

If you tell me what a newspaper looks like I can get closer and find someone holding one.

Like this. Image.